Combat

Starting a Fight

To attack someone in the same room, type attack <name> (or fight <name>, combat <name>, engage <name>; they all do the same thing). If the target is a combatant NPC, the fight begins immediately. If the target is another player, the rules depend on where you are.

Zone rules:

Open zones, most of the world. You can attack freely.
Safe zones, certain areas (including parts of Zhūwān) block PC-initiated lethal combat unless a stealth alarm has been triggered. You will see an error if you try. Use spar for friendly practice here.
Consent zones, attacking a player sends them a challenge. They must accept before the fight begins. The game will tell you if a challenge is pending.

You cannot attack your own side, and you cannot attack RP-only NPCs who have no combat training.

Sparring

spar <name> opens a friendly match that uses the same mechanics as real combat but tracks “touches” rather than HP damage. When your touch count hits your max HP, you are touched out and the round ends without anyone being hurt. Sparring is allowed in safe zones and is the standard way to practice techniques or settle grudges without consequences.

The Round Structure

Once combat starts, every participant configures their action for the round through the combat quickmenu. The round does not resolve until everyone has marked their input complete (or the input timer expires).

Each round follows this sequence:

Input phase. The quickmenu opens for each participant. You set your choices in any order, then mark Done.
Resolution. When all inputs are in, the engine resolves the entire round at once. Each fighter makes one main roll at the start of resolution; there is no mid-round dice rolling.
Results. Narrative text describes what happened. HP totals update. The quickmenu reopens for the next round.

If you submit your choices and change your mind before the round locks, type attack (with no arguments) to reopen the menu and adjust.

The Combat Quickmenu

The quickmenu is a hub: a single screen with seven configurable slots that you visit in any order before marking Done. The slots are:

Slot	What you set
Action	Your main action: Attack, Defend, Dodge, Sprint, Ability, Flee, or Surrender.
Tactic	A tactical stance for the round (see below), or a tactical ability if you have one.
Flavor	A free-text hint (up to 140 characters) describing how your character is fighting this round.
Movement	Where you want to move on the hex map.
Use Qi	How many qi dice to spend on your roll.
Options	Weapon selection (melee vs ranged) and reckless-movement toggle.
Style	Switch to a different combat style for the round (takes effect next round).

Each slot shows a checkmark when set, and the Done button confirms validation messages so you can see what is still required.

Flavor

The Flavor slot is the easiest way to colour a fight without writing emotes between rounds. Whatever you type, up to 140 characters, is fed into the round’s prose layer as a hint. It does not affect dice; it shapes how the engine describes what your character does this round. Use it to set a mood (“circling, watching for an opening”), a target (“focus on her wrist this time”), or a tone (“savage, no restraint”). Blank or clear resets it.

Main Actions

Action	What it does
Attack	Strike your current target. The default choice.
Defend	Focus entirely on blocking and parrying. Reduces incoming damage.
Dodge	Move out of harm’s way. Different defensive profile than Defend; your style determines which is better for you.
Sprint	Move aggressively across the battle map. Covers more ground but leaves you vulnerable.
Ability	Use a martial technique from your combat style (see below).
Flee	Attempt to break out of the fight and move to an adjacent room. Not guaranteed to succeed.
Surrender	Give up. Ends the fight for you (the outcome depends on your opponent).

You can also change your attack target mid-combat: attack <name> while already in a fight switches your focus.

The Main Roll

At the start of round resolution, every active fighter makes one main roll. That single result is the engine’s read on how well your character performs this round; it powers both whether attacks land and how hard they hit, with damage scaled by the threshold table below.

The roll is 2d10 exploding on 10: two ten-sided dice, and any die showing a 10 rolls again and adds. Combat does not add a flat attribute bonus to this roll, so what shapes the result is your active style and its abilities, the qi dice you spend, and your accumulated wounds. Any qi dice you spent on the attack are added on top, and your wound penalty is subtracted (each HP you have lost drags every threshold down, so a battered fighter both lands less often and hits softer). Style abilities can sweeten the roll further: extra exploding faces, rerolls, or guaranteed minimums.

If your roll wildly overshoots a target’s defence, that excess feeds into the damage threshold table; a glancing roll over the line still hurts, but a brutal overshoot can carve multiple HP off in one round.

Standard Tactical Actions

The Tactic slot lets you adopt a stance for the round, separate from your main action. The stances are:

Stance	Effect
Area Denial	Block enemies from moving past you. Lateral movement within 1 hex of you is denied, and climbers get kicked back down. Qi Lightness users bypass this.
Qi Aura	Each attacker who hits you this round deals 5 less damage. Costs your qi regeneration for the round.
Qi Lightness	+3 hexes of movement, and you ignore terrain penalties (hazards, climbing). Costs your qi regeneration for the round.
Guard	Protect an adjacent ally. 50% chance to redirect their incoming damage to you, with a +2 damage modifier on the incoming hit.
Back to Back	Mutual protection with an adjacent ally. 25% one-sided redirect, rising to 50% with -1 damage if both of you take the stance.
Shove	On your first completed melee attack, push the defender directly back 1 hex and follow into the hex they vacated. Walls, occupied hexes, and forced-movement immunity can stop the shove.
Companion Assist	If your animal companion is summoned, send it to aid an ally anywhere on the battle map. Each assisting companion gives that ally +1 to every damage threshold for the round.
None	Skip the stance, no effect.

If your style includes tactical abilities (healing techniques, buffs, debuffs, sect-specific manoeuvres), they appear here alongside the stances. Tactical abilities resolve during round resolution, not as a standalone main action, so you can pair them with an attack.

The Tactic menu also surfaces environment options when relevant: smashing a window adjacent to you, breaking a debris pile to clear or block a path, detonating a munitions crate within reach.

Qi in Combat

Qi fuels both attack and defence. You begin each fight with a pool of qi dice. Spending them on an attack rolls those dice and adds the result to your damage. Spending them on defence rolls them as armour against incoming strikes. Each die explodes on its own maximum face.

You gain qi as you take damage; adversity sharpens it. The pool caps at 3 dice, and you regenerate a fraction of a die each round even without taking hits. Two stances (Qi Aura and Qi Lightness) consume your regeneration for the round in exchange for their effect.

Combat Styles and Abilities

Your active style determines which abilities you can use and how your basic attacks behave. Outside combat, list and switch with:

stance               -- show your current stance and all known styles
stance <style name>  -- switch to a different style

Inside combat, style switching goes through the Style slot of the quickmenu and takes effect at the start of the next round.

Abilities are special techniques drawn from your martial style. Each has its own effect: extra damage, debuffs, repositioning on the hex map, ally protection. They appear in the menu under the Ability action when available. Using an ability costs qi dice and may impose a cooldown.

Restrictions in special fights

When a fight is launched as part of a stealth mission, the engine quietly filters your ability list to two flags: abilities marked non-lethal and abilities marked stealthable. Anything you know that fails either filter is hidden from the menu, since a stealth mission turns into a much harder problem the moment a guard is killed or a wall comes down loudly. A few styles are predominantly lethal; expect those characters to lean on basic attacks and tactical stances during stealth work.

Sparring does not hard-block abilities. The same menu options are available, but all damage is converted to touches against your sparring max, so killing strikes simply touch you out instead of taking you to the floor.

The Hex Map and Movement

Every fight runs on a hex grid: you, your opponents, terrain features, and hazards all occupy specific hexes, and most actions care about the distance between them. The webclient renders the grid graphically alongside the quickmenu. For screen-reader and text-only play, the combat command gives you the same information in plain text.

Reading the map with `combat`

The text-mode interface (also aliased as cb, ci, fight status, battle) prints a clear list of who is where and what they can do.

Command	What it shows
`combat` or `combat status`	Round, phase, your HP / Qi, enemy count.
`combat enemies`	Each enemy: name, HP, distance in hexes, weapon, status.
`combat allies`	Same detail for allies.
`combat recommend`	Suggested target with reasoning (low HP, in melee range, etc.).
`combat actions`	Available actions this round, with command syntax.
`combat menu`	The quickmenu rendered as numbered text.
`combat help`	Full subcommand list.

Distances are always in hexes. HP is always shown as current/max. A typical melee weapon reaches 1 hex; ranged weapons reach further. The combat system always treats melee as adjacent (1 hex); reach mainly affects when segments compress.

Movement

The Movement slot in the quickmenu lets you set where to move during the round. You can move toward someone, away from them, to a specific hex, stand still, flee, or perform style-specific moves like wall-flip. Sprinting (as your main action) lets you cover more ground at the cost of defence.

Base movement costs 1 hex per movement point. Hazard hexes (see below) cost 2. Qi Lightness flattens all that back to 1 and lets you climb any elevation difference without needing a ramp or stairs.

Map features

The hex grid is richer than just open ground. The terrain you fight on can include:

Elevation. Hexes carry an elevation level. Fighting from higher ground adds up to +2 damage; fighting from lower ground gives you the inverse. Climbing or descending more than 5 levels in one step requires a ramp, stairs, or ladder hex; otherwise you cannot make the transition without Qi Lightness.
Walls. Solid wall hexes block movement and (depending on type) line of sight. Doorways, archways, and openings are passable; gates and doors only when open.
Cover. Many hexes carry a cover object (a tree, a column, a stack of crates, debris). Cover gives the occupant defensive benefit against incoming attacks across the line of sight.
Windows. Breakable. Adjacent fighters can smash them through the Tactic menu, creating a new path and glass underfoot, and an opening to shove somebody through.
Breakable and kickable things. Vases, hanging lights, water and oil barrels, braziers, torches, munitions crates, mushroom beds, lotus pollen, cliff edges. Every battlemap is guaranteed at least three of them, and at least one within three hexes of where each side starts.

Using the room

Fighting next to something is not decoration. A tactic spent on the scenery is meant to be worth at least as much as a swing, and the numbers say so. (For scale: 12 raw is 1 HP, 20 is 2 HP, 32 is 3 HP, and a typical fighter has about 6.)

Shove somebody into a wall and they hit it for 20 raw (2 HP) and go down. A longer knockback that gets stopped early charges more, up to 32. Shove them into another fighter and both take it: the one you pushed on the full curve, the one they hit one band lower, and both are staggered.
Break a vase or a hanging light and the shards cover that hex and its neighbours: 14 raw (1 HP) to walk in, 32 raw (3 HP) for anyone knocked down on them, and again every round they stay down. Putting somebody on the floor and leaving them on the glass is the best two-round combination in the game.
Kick an adjacent vase, barrel, brazier, torch or piece of furniture up to 3 hexes in a 45-degree fan away from you. 14 raw at one hex, 20 at two, 26 at three, and it goes at whoever you were aiming your attack at — unless somebody else is standing in the way, in which case they wear it. A brazier or torch adds fire and leaves them dazed; a barrel or a table staggers them and the table takes its cover with it; a vase scatters shards where they land.
Ignite oil, then push people into it: 14 raw (1 HP) to step into fire, they catch light, and the burn keeps costing them a round at a time. Being thrown in lights you immediately.
Break a water barrel to soak somebody. A wet fighter takes half again from lightning and cold.
Detonate a munitions crate: about 3 HP at the crate, less further out, and it sets off anything flammable nearby.
Cliff edges and windows end fights. Anyone dangling who takes a landed hit or any shove goes over. Ordinary hostile fighters do not come back; you, your allies, and named or boss enemies are out for two rounds and return having taken 32 raw. A window drops you outside for a round and 20 raw.
Pits cost 20 raw and you clamber out on the floor. Deep water costs no HP but takes your round while you surface, and you come up soaked.
Qi blast (a channeling style at level 7 or better) pours every whole qi die you have into liquid already on the ground and sweeps it outward in a 45-degree fan, 2 to 8 hexes long depending on the roll. Water soaks and shoves; oil coats; burning oil sets everyone in the fan alight for 14 raw each. It hits allies too, and the dice are not refunded if somebody breaks your barrel first.
Hold a hazard with the Tactic menu — mushrooms, lotus pollen, or burning oil within your reach — and it springs on the first enemy who walks into it or past it. 20 raw plus poison, intoxication, or fire. It lasts one round, so time it against somebody who is charging you.

Everything you do to somebody by force is credited to you.

Hazard hexes

Hazards are tiles that affect anyone standing on them or moving through them. The full list includes:

Fire and fire hazard: 14 raw on entry, you catch light, and it burns again at round end.
Oil: coats you if you go down on it, and ignites if a fire reaches it.
Sharp ground: 14 raw to enter, 32 if you are prone on it.
Puddle and frozen patch: soaks you (lightning and cold hit half again as hard) or risks a slip.
Long fall: an exposed edge; being shoved off is the end of your fight.
Open window: passable, and a way out of the building you did not choose.
Poison cloud and ice zone: persistent zones inflicting on residents.
Pressure zone: triggers an effect tied to who steps on it.

All of them double movement cost for ordinary fighters, and most of them inflict their own damage or status on top. Qi Lightness ignores the cost (but not the secondary effect, so don’t sprint through fire). Walking over the same shards twice in a round only costs you once; being thrown onto them always costs.

Studying Other Fighters

study <name> lets you quietly observe another character to learn something about their combat style. Each time your target performs an emote in the same room, there is a chance you catch a glimpse of one of their styles. There is also a chance your target notices the scrutiny. Use study stop to end the observation.

How Damage Resolves

Romance of Five Kingdoms does not subtract raw damage numbers from HP directly. Instead, raw damage is compared against a threshold table to determine how many HP you actually lose. The thresholds shift based on how wounded you already are.

Base thresholds (unwounded):

Raw Damage	HP Lost
0 to 11	0 (miss)
12 to 19	1 HP
20 to 31	2 HP
32 to 101	3 HP
102 to 201	4 HP
202 to 301	5 HP
302+	6+ HP (scales upward)

Wound penalty. Every HP you have already lost shifts all thresholds down by 1. If you are at 4 out of 6 HP (2 HP lost, penalty of 2), the miss threshold drops from 11 to 9, meaning 10 raw damage now deals 1 HP instead of missing. The more battered you are, the easier it is to hurt you further.

Early hits feel glancing, but fights can turn quickly once someone accumulates wounds.

Healing and Recovery

Characters have 6 HP by default. Losing HP does not just lower your current health; it also degrades your maximum HP over time.

How degradation works. Each time you take cumulative damage equal to your current maximum HP, your maximum drops by 1 (minimum 1). Your current HP is capped to the new maximum. A character who fights repeatedly without resting eventually has a lower ceiling to heal to.

Recovering current HP between fights:

Rest naturally. Simply not fighting restores current HP to your current maximum over time.
Activity rest rounds. Group activities and adventures include dedicated rest phases. During a rest round, use activity heal to restore your current HP up to your maximum. activity continue votes to move on; the group advances when a majority is ready.

Recovering lost maximum HP requires either time away from combat or the right facility.

Wait it out. Maximum HP regenerates automatically after 6 hours without taking damage. Logging off overnight is enough to fully recover.
Soak at the Cuìquán Teahouse in Zhūwān. The mineral springs in the teahouse cellar are the only place in the empire where degraded max HP can be restored on demand. 2 Gold Dollars at the front desk buys an afternoon’s access; in the pool, you regain 1 maximum HP every 15 minutes until you are back to full.

There is no in-game heal command from town apothecaries or surgeons. Towns have herbalists and apothecaries as flavour and roleplay anchors, but mechanical HP recovery runs through rest, activity heal rounds, and (for max-HP damage) the Zhūwān springs.

Quick Command Reference

Command	Purpose
`attack <target>`	Start a fight, or set your attack target during combat
`fight <target>`	Alias for attack
`spar <target>`	Start a friendly sparring match
`stance`	Show known styles and active stance
`stance <style>`	Switch to a different combat style (outside combat only)
`study <target>`	Observe someone to learn their style
`study stop`	Stop observing
`combat`	Show combat status during a fight
`combat enemies`	List enemies with HP and position
`combat allies`	List allies with HP and position
`combat recommend`	Get a target suggestion
`combat actions`	List available actions this round
`combat menu`	Show the quickmenu as numbered text
`activity heal`	Heal during an activity rest round
`activity continue`	Vote to move on during an activity rest round